Lioness

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

The first half of Lioness, co-directors' Meg McLagan's and Daria Sommers' debut, focuses on the arcane circumstances that brought the first unit of female combat fighters (dubbed "Team Lioness") together. Since the Iraq invasion has never been officially declared a war, there are technically no combat missions being fought there. Ergo, female soldiers can be placed on the frontlines of any engagement despite it presently being illegal for them to serve in combat situations. The Marines' missions focus on following up on gathered intelligence routing out insurgents and terrorist cells, which are typically run out of private residences. Because male American soldiers frisking Muslim women in burkas could conceivably lead to a jihad that would consume the entire Arabian desert, female soldiers (none of whom speak Farsi) were dispatched to placate the locals.

But because the Lioness team members all came from the Army and were never trained in the Marines' weaponry, strategy or vernacular there were many occasions when the women were abandoned during shootouts or were nearly left behind in villages without an operational vehicle or map. Watching this documentary one understands why the the Bush administration's 'women in the military' meme was Jessica Lynch and not Team Lioness. Months after returning from their tours, the women still express deep resentment at the unnecessary dangers they faced due to what amounted to a poorly organized propaganda effort.

Import Export

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***½

The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl makes uneasy films. There's a hint of black humor, but it's kept at a great distance, as if only Seidl were truly in on the joke; if his movies were a party, you might laugh along -- even if you didn't understand -- just so you wouldn't feel left out. There's also a mean undercurrent that, if the jokes don't work, can cause the work to feel abhorrent and cruel. His 2001 Dog Days -- released in the United States in 2003 -- divided reviewers right down the middle (this reviewer hated it) but his latest film Import Export (from 2007, but newly available on DVD) adds the welcome element of humanity to stand between the cruelty and humor.

Departures

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The steal of the Best Foreign Language Film category at last year's Academy Awards ceremony, Departures (Okuribito), the Japanese entry directed by Yôjirô Takita (Onmyoji) and written by Kundo Koyama, was a surprise winner, besting critics' darlings Waltz With Bashir (from Israel) and The Class (France), Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex and Austria's Revanche. This bizarre combination of death, tradition and cello playing did what so many of the winning films in this category have done down the decades: It moved, surprised and enlightened its audience.

But was it the best of these films? Not by a long shot. I'd have ranked them thusly: Baader Meinhof, The Class, Departures, Revanche and Waltz With Bashir*. Having finally seen Departures, I think I understand the dichotomy experienced around the time of the awards -- reading all the negatives from most of the "better" critics, yet constantly hearing such good things about the movie from one after another of what we might call the "average" art-house moviegoer.

The House of the Devil

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Ti West's 2005 horror film The Roost, his first feature, gained him some notoriety as a throwback creature feature. It foreshadowed the path he'd go down as a filmmaker -- a B horror movie with a 70s/80s visual style, a refreshing lack of gloss - but it was uneven, a bit silly, and had one ending too many. His new film The House of the Devil finds a maturing West moving through similar terrain but more assuredly. It's again a return to old school horror but there's nothing campy here; it captures the vibe without winking at the audience. This isn't Scream.

A title card tells us we're in the 80s, with ominous words about the high number of Americans who believed then in abusive Satanic Cults, and the even more ominous words that the following is based – loosely no doubt -- on real events.  Even the opening credits are done in 80s horror movie font and freeze-frame style with a slightly cheesy synth-beat music score. And the film’s storyline is refreshingly simple: a broke co-ed applies for babysitting gig with the wrong family, and… it doesn't go well.

Enlighten Up

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

For a movie that's so entertaining and even, at times, philosophically rich, it's too bad that Enlighten Up! has a gimmicky premise. Director Kate Churchill, in voiceover, describes her seven years of yoga practice, and wonders whether yoga can transform a person's life in only six months, whether it's possible for a total beginner to achieve a spiritual awakening in that time? (Why six months? Why not a year or more?) Kate herself is conveniently exempt from being a subject, so she sets about finding somebody who has never practiced yoga, so he can explore the subject. She'll just tag along and see what happens.

Paris, Texas (Criterion)

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

The three major figures of the German New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s took three completely divergent paths. Rainer Werner Fassbinder remained determinedly local and burned out quickly, dying at the age of 37 after pumping out more than 40 films in 15 years. Werner Herzog became interested in issues of man versus nature, and often ventured out into uncomfortable sections of the world, in both features and documentaries. Meanwhile, Wim Wenders became fascinated by America, and especially the open road that connected all the various people and places within. A good number of his movies deal with characters that travel from one place to another, especially the three-hour Kings of the Road (1976), which is sadly absent from DVD. Happily, his best-known and best-loved road movie Paris, Texas (1984) has just been re-issued in a beautiful Criterion Collection edition.

Pandorum

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The science fiction genre is basically defined as imaginary stories that employ science elements, such as traveling in time machines or discovering life on other planets. Yet the genre has often been used as a way to deliver weighty messages aboutthe wrong direction mankind is generally headed in. A great many successful and acclaimed science fiction movies such as these surfaced in 2009. Beloved examples like Star Trek, District 9 and Avatar, were merely war movies disguised as science fiction, with humans battling aliens rather than people of another culture. Yet, occasionally sci-fi films do come along that try to deal with things more mysterious than war; they're more interested in characters than in mankind.

German-born Christian Alvart makes his American directorial debut (his first film was the creepy serial killer film Antibodies) with Pandorum, and though it may not be the most brilliant example, it's still an intensely effective sci-fi chiller, mainly thanks to its canny set and sound design, and its constant, relentless sense of dread and tension. Oddly, it is yet another film with a message, but the message is so nicely hidden within the surprise turns of plot that there's never any preachy feeling.

You, the Living

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

Swedish-born filmmaker Roy Andersson began making films in the late 1960s, but to date has completed only nine films: five shorts and four features. That makes him one of the deliberate filmmakers in history, up there with Bresson and Kubrick. On top of that, it took a while for his latest film, You, the Living, to reach theaters. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, had a single screening a year later at the San Francisco International Film Festival and then -- thanks to newly refurbished distributor Palisades Tartan -- finally opened in a couple of U.S. theaters in the summer of 2009. As far as I can tell, it's only the second Andersson film to play here, after 2001's superb Songs from the Second Floor.

All this slowness probably prevents Andersson from being the major director he deserves to be; he's like a cold soup mix of Buster Keaton, David Lynch, Jerry Lewis and Terry Gilliam, and yet he's a total original, hawking deadpan jokes as well as chilly, disheartening mean streaks in his blocky, deep-space single takes. Every frame is awash in blue-gray -- gray clothes, buildings and clouds (a thunder and lightning storm breaks up the grayness by turning it a bit darker). There's rarely a continuous cut within a scene, and camera moves are even scarcer. His disparate characters talk about dreams and nightmares, practice musical instruments (Living has a hilariously ill-fitting ragtime score) or simply wait in endless lines.

Death in the Garden

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

If you’re familiar with the early to middle period of Spanish director Luis Buñuel, you may not be surprised at what he does with the dark adventure/melodrama from 1956, Death In The Garden. I would guess that this was work-for-hire for the director who began his career with the classics Un chien andalou and L'âge d'or, and then went on the do everything from anti-Franco propaganda films during the Spanish Civil War to late, semi-great works like Tristana and That Obscure object of Desire.

I am also guessing that what attracted Buñuel to this material was its dark elements: how religion, responsibility, money and sexual attraction are used for survival, and can lead to betrayal. With three other writers, Buñuel co-adapted the novel by José-André Lacour and managed to create an unflaggingly interesting tale of what happens when a South American military dictatorship decides to take over, without warning (and of course without just cause), the diamond prospecting of a number of locals and foreigners located near a military outpost surrounded by jungle (the “garden” of the title). The first major surprise of the film, given all but one of the director’s movies (Robinson Crusoe) that had come before, is that this one’s in color.

Outrage

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

To each generation of gay rights activists there is a galvanizing moment where the status quo becomes intolerable. In the 80s it was the Reagan administration's denial of AIDS while half a million Americans died; in the 90s it was the passage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," banning gays from serving in the military. In the Aughts it was the totality of the 2004 Republican strategy to win the presidency and house seats by funding anti-gay measures across the states' to encourage religious fundamentalists to vote.

The documentar Outrage presents BlogActive creator Michael Rogers as the leader of a new opposition movement. Rogers employs the values of old-fashioned yellow journalism with the tenacity and immediacy of blogging to collect data and out political figures who by night have same sex partners but spend their daylight hours chipping away at the civil liberties and safety of out homosexuals. Outrage also demonstrates the baffling inability of mainstream media to cover these issues at all -- even when it involves inappropriate expenditures of funds to take a same sex staffers on exotic locations or when it is a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. (Though the film leaves aside any issue of how one defines lesser hypocrisies when the nature of federal legislation is so convoluted, a single vote impacts a myriad of different issues.)

Director Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Sick) wades into the complications that arises around privacy rights when discussing people who are not only public personas but law-makers and how expectations of honesty can conflict with the realities of political campaigning. The cognitive dissonance experienced by men like Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Florida Governor (and 2012 presidential hopeful) Charlie Crist is played as equally tragic, to see people so at odds with their own reality and as a series craven political choices that have destroyed the lives of millions of people.

It feels a bit "Let them eat cake"-ish to gush too much about the glorious political theater on display in the film. But it's worth mentioning Outrage could serve as a primer course on legislative fundamentals as Dick gains access to virtually every out gay politician on the national level, and also some of the top level staffers, think tankers, political pundits, fundraisers, lobbyists and legal advisors.

Former Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey provide particularly heartwrenching insight into being outed while in office, one having had enough time to feel liberated the other still dealing with the immediate fallout if tearing a family apart and seeing one's career end publicly.

DVD extras include Commentary with Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, deleted scenes, Director Q&A, and panel discussion from the Tribecca Film Festival.

Trailer:

Che (Criterion)

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): Che Part One (The Argentine): ****
Che Part Two (Guerilla): ****½

When it comes to Steven Soderbergh, there seem to be two camps of people who follow his work. One believes he is one of the most prolific, diverse and surprising American filmmakers working today. The other thinks he is a gutless Hollywood shill whose art-house fare hardly makes up for his blockbuster shlock. (I've seen both these camps posting and commenting on various film blogs.) Divided into two parts, the two films comprising Che seem to prove why both sides are right and wrong. Part One smacks of a glossy studio biopic while Part Two delves deep into the psyche of a revolutionary being. In other words, Soderbergh gets to have his cake and eat it too.

Che Part One follows Ernesto “Che” Guevara, played brilliantly by Benicio del Toro, through his successful and famous campaign through Cuba. Cinematically, this film picks up almost exactly where Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries leaves off. In that film, Gael Garcia Bernal plays a lithe, silky, almost prepubescent version of Guevara curiously bouncing around South America, incubating his mission. Del Toro fills out a much more grown up version of the character. His whole physicality, from the bags under his eyes to his lumbering gait, exudes that of a man who has seen some serious shit. Featuring sporadic use of voice over and flash forwards to New York City in 1964, this is the Guevara biopic that Hollywood would make if they could put some weight behind a real live Marxist. This Che is the sillhouette who adorns smoky dorm rooms the world over: a rock star. But only just so.